This copy of the New Testament in Tamil, a Dravidian language spoken by the Tamil people of southern India, was published in 1843 by the Madras Auxiliary Bible Society. It is a revised version of Johann Philipp Fabricius’s translation, which he published in 1772. Fabricius was a German missionary and Tamil scholar who worked in southern India for nearly 50 years. Charles Theophilus Ewald Rhenius, one of Fabricius’s successors, oversaw the revision, which was produced in 1833. Today, Tamil is spoken by more than 78 million people, most of whom live in India and Sri Lanka.